You must have been riding one of those early Scott foils.
Carbon can be engineered to be stiff enough to rattle your fillings out or with lots of compliance like the Specialized Roubaix model. That's the beauty of carbon it provides all kinds of options for frame design and shape that are much harder to achieve with metals.

Yes falls can happen anyway but they happen less often at the front. As Alex points out, doped or not, the strongest are up there and they are in control and alert, not shagged and just hanging on. As well the further back you go you get more of a "stretching and contracting" reaction (Liggitism/Sherwinism: the concertina effect) to variations in speed and this is when tired individuals can get caught overlapping wheels. If your front wheel gets into an overlapping situation and the guy in front moves sideways he'll take your wheel out. This is why the strongest teams always kept their leaders near the front to minimise the chance of being caught up in a crash.

They didn't. USADA did.
Yes unfortunately until we have all free legal services (utopia) those with the biggest bank roll can win in certain situations. Or maybe they are saving their resources for a bigger battle in order to win the war?

I have been down the last few days with bronchitis (and I've been prescribed salbutamol, amongst other things) and I saw the above when I logged on to check how my team was going. A shame as I thought I had a good team this year too. Probably would have won
I wonder what the lawyers were claiming? Probably something they have no legal right to. I kind of thought ASO were all about fair play, sounds like greed to me. So does this fantasy game they are running cost money?

Yes I reread it, but you have to remember if you are going to take a black letter approach, it is more than just the code. It's the CAS and procedures too. Which do allow TUEs for salbutimol. My guess is this substance in a couple of years will be taken off the list like caffeine was. There has been no evidence to show high doses of it have a steroid effect it is just thought it might.
I'm not unsympathetic to these suspicions about Froome but tying to nail him on a salbutimol infraction, which by the way his lawyers seem to have successfully defended, is really only going to be a misdemeanor when it sounds like something much bigger is going on.
C) Trump ever declaring a conflict of interest
Good article.

I agree this is a worrying development but let's not forget during Lance's time there was no bio passport or random out of competition testing though as he demonstrated adverse test results can be made to not exist. Is it possible Sky could have rebuilt a network of secrecy and corrupt UCI officials in such a short period of time? Does this also mean other teams are also involved in keeping this all secret?

Pretty simple if there is some kind of shared responsibility you just sue TA and the RD jointly and let the Court decide the amount for which each defendant is liable.
Unfortunately the athlete insurance has all kinds of limits on it necessitating litigation to recover the total amount.
Hopefully lessons are learned and changes are made to prevent a recurrence.

Like caffeine was, then wasn't? If WADA is going to ban things it needs to be credible - this is probably a separate argument.
Anyway, that's funny; that is the link I also provided (see above) and the article questions whether there is any real performance enhancement and the research only suggests it may have a steroidal effect if taken in large enough doses... which is unproven, and in Froome's case it was not a large excess and only once.
If we're going to compare Froome with LA, I think we are going to need far more evidence than than this. I think there's a certain amount of group think going on here and somehow based on the sheerest of anomalies he's now up there with the greatest systematic doper of all times. On the evidence so far I think not.

Do tell. Are you implying salbutamol is part of some established doping protocol or some kind of masking agent? If you know something, you can't just let the cat half out of the bag!
I mean we knew about EPO and how it worked it was just hard to detect it initially before it disappeared from the system, Anyone know how salbutamol is used to any great effect? Or are we just suspecting?

It starts with the athletes and it's called culture. What would you rather a culture where cheating is tolerated, accepted and expected or a culture of honest hard racing?
If the LA years of cycling taught us anything, it was that in a culture of cheating they will always find a way to outsmart the officials.
Political careers ahead of them!

To be honest the performance enhancement offered by salbutamol seems to be without much evidence to support it... http://www.cyclist.co.uk/news/4053/salbutamol-can-be-performance-enhancing-says-wada . It's nothing like EPO or steroids although according to the article there is some research that suggest large amounts of salbutamol could act like a steroid and help increase muscle mass. From my reading that is only a suggestion and there is no actual result where this has actually happened and would require larger sustained doses beyond Froome's level. More likely than not, it is simply an honest mistake with the dosage at the time possibly due to incorrectly taking into account other factors which might influence the levels present in the blood.